[Imladris]

Originally Posted by Ealasaide

Ah, Imladris, you are obviously not the glutton for detail that I am! If I am talking about a ship, I want to make the reader see the ship with as much detail as possible. I want to come as close to putting my reader on the ship beside my character as I possibly can. If my character is a sailor, for example, I would like for him to be able to talk about his vessel with at least the appearance of being knowledgeable about his vessel. I would like for him to be able to talk about the decks and the sails and usage of the sails, not be stuck saying merely, "hmmm, the wind is up. Let's sail!" No insult intended, but isn't ignoring specifics of detail the lazy way out?

Being vague might be the lazy man's out, but considering that Tolkien himself was vague on such things as style, we don't really have much of a choice, do we? However, I never said, "Don't describe the ship." You said something about whether the ship was like a Viking ship, etc. However, ships have pretty much the same parts in general: decks, aft, starboard, etc. You can use these. Just because you don't say how the ship overall looks like doesn't mean we are being lazy. I never said that we shouldn't describe at all. I said we should focus on other things other than the over all looks, ie, whether a ship looks like a viking ship or a pirate ship or whatnot because we don't know. What we do know are a few of the details (listed above) that we can use to make it seem real.

To explain, let me quote your ship example:

But does one visualize a Viking-style longship when taking to the sea? Or a three-masted ship with a quarterdeck, multiple sails and complex rigging, only sans cannon, of course.

We have a ship.
We don't know how the ship looks like since Tolkien didn't describe the culture of the race using the ship. Thus we are vague on the way this ship looks like.
However, we know that all ships have a certain kind of sails, decks, aft, etc. We use these to make it real.

Lazy? Hardly.

I would also like to say that Tolkien never described how a ship in general looked like (as if it was like a Viking sort of ship). In the part of the Sil where King Ar-Phazon was going to attack Valinor he didn't tell us how the ships in general looked like. He described their banners, how their masts looked like a forested island, etc. In other words, he was vague on how they looked like. Same thing with the Corsair ships. The only thing we knew about them was that they had black sails and they were still real.

What I am saying is that we should focus on the details of the ship (sails, decks, etc) and not on the over all ship (Viking ship, etc). Is that still lazy, or did you misunderstand me? As Bb said, saying what you thought I was saying would be bad writing.

I would also like to point out that we cannot use Vikings, Edwardian, etc styles because they were after ME's time.

could the fact that hobbits tend to hide from big folks really be interpretted as an advance in technology? It seems to me - and it's just my off-the-cuff opinion - that that would indicate a change in social interaction, rather than any technological change. Why do the hobbits make themselves scarce? I believe Tolkein said it was because they were shy by nature and that big people were noisy and blundered about with very little care for their surroundings. This does bring to mind a less pastoral mind-set on the part of the big people, but I fail to see the connection between this and technology. I'd be very interested in seeing how you arrived at this conclusion!

ME is a myth of our own world (thus, ME and our world are the same, much as the Grecian gods lived in Greece). We are big folks. Our world has advanced technologically. Thus, the ages of Middle Earth also advanced Technologically.

And, since I was too dumb to speak of it earlier, there were technological advances. The Silmarils, the dwarven craftsmanship, all equal advancement (in this case, artistic). If there was artistic advancement, then there was technilogical advances. Saruman advanced technologically, as did Melkor. Unfortunately they were evil advancements...